G Suite for Education: Common Questions

General information

Google is currently offering schools a hosted solution for their email, calendar, and chat through G Suite for Education, our integrated communication and collaboration solution. Additionally, you can complement the core suite to meet your users' needs, with access to several more Google services.

G Suite for Education is free. We plan to keep the core offering of G Suite for Education free. This offering includes user accounts for future incoming students. As you may know, Google was founded by a research project at Stanford University, and this is just one way we can give back to the educational community.

To see the available features included in G Suite for Education, visit the G Suite for Education homepage.

Who doesn't qualify for G Suite for Education?

For all EDU domains, ads are turned off in G Suite for Education services and K–12 G Suite for Education users don't see ads when they use Google Search and are signed in to their G Suite for Education accounts.

With G Suite for Education, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Drive, and Google Sites are guaranteed to be available at least 99.9% of the time, ensuring that users have access when they need it. The G Suite team is committed to providing your school with the best level of service. For more information, please see the G Suite Service Level Agreement.

Deployment

The number of users you can have on G Suite for Education is practically limitless (as long as you aren't generating spam). You can request more Education accounts via the Admin console interface. In addition to that, we don't require you to delete inactive users.

G Suite for Education services don't collect or use student data for advertising purposes or to create ad profiles.

Gmail for consumers and G Suite for Education users runs on the same infrastructure, which helps us deliver high performance, reliability, and security to all of our users. However, G Suite is a separate offering that provides additional security, administrative and archiving controls for education, work, and government customers.

Like many email providers, we do scanning in Gmail to keep our customers secure and to improve their product experience. In Gmail for G Suite for Education, this includes virus and spam protection, spell check, relevant search results and features like Priority Inbox and auto-detection of calendar events. Scanning to provide product features is done on all incoming emails and is 100% automated. We do NOT scan G Suite for Education emails for advertising purposes.

Two of the most common questions regarding Google, in general, and G Suite specifically, are security and privacy. We take both topics very seriously and truly believe that our offerings are a great option for customers on both fronts.

Our business is built on our users' trust: trust in our ability to properly secure their data and our commitment to respect the privacy of the information they place in our systems by not giving that information to others or using it inappropriately.

Alternatively, you can implement your own monitoring, filtering, or archiving solution using an email gateway. This gateway allows your school to route all mail into and out of our system through your network and affords you the ability to monitor, filter, and archive in any way you see fit. Learn how to configure an inbound mail gateway.

If you don’t want to configure it yourself, we have a number of Marketplace partners who can offer this service.

Yes. We contractually require that schools using G Suite for Education get the parental consent required by COPPA. Our services can be used in compliance with COPPA as long as a school has parental consent.

Important: You must sign up for G Suite for Education using an existing domain that you own. Domains cannot be purchased through the sign-up process. After you sign up, you have access to a free trial of G Suite Basic while your organization qualifications are under review. If your account is not approved for G Suite for Education, your account cannot be upgraded to G Suite Basic. The account will be suspended after the 30-day period, and you’ll need to move any email or data created during this period to a Google consumer service (such as Gmail) or another service.

The G Suite Help Center is a great resource to troubleshoot any problems. If you cannot find the answer online, 24/7 phone, email, and chat support is available with your G Suite for Education account.

Note: Chat support is only available in English. If you're an administrator, sign in to your account and click Contact Us. Learn more.